Victory Against al-Qaida Is A Choice

The Washington Post notes the emerging consensus of John Brennan, Leon Panetta and others in the counterterrorism community: al-Qaida is on the brink of defeat. "If you mean that we have rendered them largely incapable of catastrophic attacks against the homeland, then I think Panetta is exactly right," a 'senior U.S. counterterrorism official' told Greg Miller. But would we even know how to react if victory stared us in the face?

I submit that the path Brennan and Panetta are charting is one of lower-scale perpetual war in the name of a consolidated victory. Read the White House counterterrorism strategy: it's about proliferating drone strikes and commando raids to bottle up and degrade al-Qaida offshoots where they arise. It depends on consolidating the apparatus of surveillance that the Obama administration has inherited and expanded from his predecessor. It combines all that with a cautious drawdown of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And it entails no expiration point. 

There is a very understandable logic here. Rapid unspooling of the war risks unraveling its gains. "Success" in a war like this is something an abstract concept, which is the main reason that conceiving of it as a war is problematic. And drawing down the wars is still a major strategic decision. Everyone understood there would be no conventional point at which it ends. So far, "success" cashes out to "keep fighting." The White House plan suggests that in the future, "consolidating victory" will also mean "keep fighting." That remains the politically safe position for everyone in Washington. 

But that speaks to the essential point. Victory against al-Qaida isn't just a battlefield circumstance, an argument won in Tahrir Square or a missile aimed at an al-Shabaab commander. It's a conscious strategic decision taken by politicians to say: the costs of this campaign are vastly out of proportion to the actual threat posed by al-Qaida, and so it is time to drive those costs down into something proportional. That is what victory actually is: terrorism as a managable threat, not to be dealt with through a perpetual global war. Once we harden some domestic targets, maximize the 'Americanness' of U.S. Muslims, bolster the defensive capabilities of key foreign allies -- their populations more than their security apparat -- then we can slow down the drone strikes responsibly, replace them with ISR orbits and do some strikes and roundups as necessary, harassing al-Qaida's residual capability to regenerate itself. The 9/11 era ends on our terms. 

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has some valuable suggestions here. I think they can go further. I want the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act gone. No extensions, no excuses, no blanket targeting of American communications or metadata. 

These are difficult political choices. They require making a sustained case to the public that it's what victory looks like, and why it's better than the alternatives. They require standing up to an argument that al-Qaida's "ideology" -- it's really just a conspiracy theory -- motivations and capabilities are no different than those of other terror groups; or even Islam itself. Those arguments, if you haven't noticed, are stronger now. In the wake of 9/11 there were no widespread protests against mosques in Tennessee or a political apparatus that brought idiotic fears of "sharia law" before state legislatures. The war on terrorism, domestically, is entering a decadent phase of kulturkampf. There's reason to believe that trend will accelerate as the actual threat from al-Qaida recedes, since it bears no resemblance to the threat itself that isn't pretextual, an outlet for non-Muslim people's anxieties. 

Who will choose victory? 

 

Comments

[fire blanket]

Difficult choice indeed but safety and security first

[Norman Patrick]

What he said really.

Norman Patrick
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[Timberland Boots]

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